The problem is that, too often, management and "media" types see flash as some sort of content deliver panacea. It isn't, of course, its performance is too variable across the diverse platforms for which it is available, resulting in a poor experience for a large proportion of users.

The BBC's adoption of Flash for the delivery of iPlayer content to Android (and other mobile platforms) is a case in point. Just look at the comments left on the Android Market:-

The thing is, Flash is the cheap* option, allegedly write once run anywhere, but that didn't work for Java, and it certainly doesn't work for Flash.

* Actually the "cheap" option for the BBC would have been to publish an open delivery standard and let 3rd parties write the clients, but the "rights holders" had hissy fits about that notion because they were worried about piracy. The fact that almost all BBC broadcasts are broadcast "in the clear" and appear on BitTorrent soon after broadcast in higher quality than that available from iPlayer hasn't occurred to them.

The only way I canz whatches my youtubes with out the Flashes crashing is to turns off the youtubes cookies. But nowz I cantz login and leave those thought provoking comments I make on dowz peeps videos.

I think I have played every other video on youtube but that one won't work....

OMG that was so awesome. It's a shame the author is going to take it down today because everyone who has watched it, mysteriously gets super human powers -- and some people are not using them for good.